Page:A Chapter on Slavery.djvu/37

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SLAVERY IN RUSSIA.
23

How has he departed from the image of his Maker! how has he turned love into hate! what miseries is he willing to inflict upon his fellow-man!

Mr. Thompson also saw a female slave who, for the crime of arson, had suffered the punishment of the knout, and had recovered from it. "While visiting the prison," says he, "I expressed to Dr. Haas (a philanthropic individual, who has spent his whole life and fortune, after the example of our Howard, in attempting to mitigate the horrors of a prison, and to reform its inmates) a wish to see the effects of the knout. He immediately called out and desired any person who had undergone the punishment, to come forward; when a young woman, of about twenty, presented herself, and, ‘ without the slightest hesitation or compunction, bared her back. A twelvemonth had elapsed since the punishment had been inflicted, which, in her case, had been confined to five lashes. The wounds-had, of course, long healed, and the skin was perfectly smooth over them; but five red marks of a finger’s breadth each, and of considerable length, were indelibly imprinted between her shoulders, as if branded by fire."[1]

Where is English sympathy? Is there none left for these forty-two millions of enslaved beings, still remaining in Europe, — subject, thus, to the rod, the lash, and the terrible knout, — liable, too, at times, to the horrors of starvation from the recklessness of their haughty masters? Is there no one to write a Russian "Uncle Tom,"[2] to bring the picture of their wrongs before the world? Forty-two millions! — a greater number of white men existing in bondage, this moment, in a single

  1. Life in Russia, Letter xix.
  2. Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Mrs. Stowe.